Meet the scientists!

I’m training to be a respiratory physician (doctor with an interest in lungs and to some extent the person surrounding them too!) and as part of that I’m involved in scientific research into developing treatments for lung disease. I’m funded to do this work by the Wellcome trust who also fund this event (not that there was any pressure on me to take part!). We are especially interested in lung diseases caused by inflammation which is a normal defence system used by the body to beat infection. In the diseases we’re interested in inflammation happens even when there’s no infection or hangs around much longer than it’s supposed too. We aim to resolve inflammation by altering the behaviour of the white blood cells (anti-infection, immune defence cells) that cause it. I am in a good position to see science move from the bench (laboratory) to the bedside (hospital) and back again which is an over-used but important phrase that basically implies that our work is/will be important for people in the world outside our building.

I work mainly in the building shown on the right which is just across the road from

Edinburgh’s main hospital (Royal Infirmary).  I can see roe deer, pheasants, heron and buzzards from my window!

I mainly work with human white blood cells called neutrophils and macrophages. These cells function a bit like pacmen in that they can eat bugs (bacteria/fungi), dead cells and other debris that needs to be removed from the body (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpOxgAU5fFQ&feature=player_embedded and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trFKvJT57Vc ). Neutrophils travel in the blood-stream to sites of infection in large numbers and can fight infection by eating bugs, spitting noxious chemicals or as a last resort exploding so that their DNA traps bugs and prevents them spreading.

Interestingly, when neutrophils die and are eaten by macrophages something about this process helps the body return to normality from what is essentially a red-alert/DEFCON 1 scenario.

In the laboratory I work in we investigate this process and how we can turn it to our advantage. I’m lucky in that I have excellent supervision from very smart, experienced senior scientists so that there are always new ideas when things take an unexpected direction.

The experiments we do involve taking blood from volunteers, isolating cells and then seeing how they behave in different conditions or with different drugs/agents. We use standard microscopes but also microscopes that detect fluorescent dyes so that we can look not just at cells but also molecules within them. We can make videos like the ones I’ve linked to above and with fancier fluorescent effects as well. A lot of our work is with a machine called a flow cytometer which bounces a laser off cells and  allows us to detect changes in the cell’s size/natural fluorescence and intricate chemistry. We also work with DNA, RNA and proteins using molecular biology techniques like western blotting and PCR.

These techniques let us know exactly what effects our new treatments are having on a cell’s function. They are tricky, pain-staking and open to interpretation but when they work well you know you’re on to a winner!

Communicating science is extremely important and we are lucky enough to have a team dedicated to this cause at Edinburgh University.  Money needs to be spent strategically to ensure it has maximum impact and I’m sure it would be better assigned by communication professionals than someone whose idea of communication is to hang an oil painting of himself in a small office shared with 5 colleagues!

As an example of how the money might be used I know that there is  a dedicated science festival in Edinburgh (it’s a festival kind of city) and that we often take the opportunity to tell everyone who’s interested (and probably quite a few who aren’t) about the work we’ve been doing at the Centre.